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At the beginning of July, I finally paid off my last credit card balance. It was the first time I had zero debt since my grad school support ran out three years ago. That began a year and a half of unemployment, which took a year and a half of full-time employment to pay off. I guess that means I make exactly twice my cost of living? Although I did start to spend more after I got a job, e.g. a laptop last January and a 26" LCD HDTV for my bedroom this January. Anyway, to celebrate, I bought another new TV for the living room.
I ended up deciding on a Samsung HL-S4666W 46" DLP HDTV from Amazon.com. I was wary of buying something that big (and fragile) by mail-order, but the reviews on that page seemed trustworthy and said it would be fine. It was certainly a good deal; Circuit City (which is where I got my other TV) had the same model but smaller (42") for about 15% more, not including tax, while Amazon.com had free shipping and no tax. Altogether it was only about 10% more than the 26" LCD; I guess DLP (Digital Light Processing) is not quite as nice as LCD or plasma, but it's much more cost-effective at that size and seems to be high enough quality that the difference isn't major.
Unfortunately this was not my best experience with Amazon.com. I ordered it on the morning of Thursday, July 6. The page said "usually ships in 24 hours", and that standard shipping was "3-5 days"; I was planning to have it in time for some Lost viewing on Sunday, July 16, so I figured 6 business days would be a reasonable amount of time. The first problem was that it didn't actually ship until late afternoon on Monday, July 10. It was shipped via Eagle USA (EGL), which I guess is a special carrier for large items like this; when I looked up my tracking number, it said the shipping class was "Economy 5 days" and the estimate was Monday, July 17. I worked from home that day, but there was no sign of it. Then on Tuesday afternoon I got voice mail saying that I had to call to make an appointment for it to be delivered, and when I called back the earliest they could give me was the next day (Wednesday), and the delivery window was "between 8am and 5pm". So it finally showed up (with two delivery guys who helpfully removed it from the box and set it up) about noon on Wednesday, July 18, almost two weeks after I ordered it. Not that two weeks is a terribly long time to ship an 85-pound TV, but it was way outside the range I was expecting from what Amazon had on their web page.
When I ordered the TV I also ordered an upconverting DVD player for about $90. Regular DVDs can only hold standard-definition recordings; newer formats that can store high-def are just starting to come out this year, namely HD-DVD and Blu-Ray, but the players are still expensive and the formats are incompatible (just like VHS and Betamax), so it'll be a while before one of them wins out and the price comes down. Meanwhile, there are these special (but inexpensive) players that take regular DVDs but output an HD signal via HDMI, using some heuristics to generate a better picture than you would normally get by just displaying standard-def component input. But for some reason neither the TV nor the DVD player came with an HDMI cable, so I went over to Circuit City to pick one up. Turns out the cheapest one they carry is $99, which was out of stock, and the next least expensive model was $120! Just for a plain old cable! I decided to shop around, and thankfully Target had an HDMI cable from General Electric that was only $40. When I got home and plugged it in it worked just fine. Is this just a scam or what? Why would anyone pay a hundred bucks for some wires and plugs?
The next problem was that I couldn't figure out how to get an HDTV signal from the Comcast cable. I have a Comcast HD DVR in my bedroom, but I'm not ready to pay another $17/mo for a second one (or even $12/mo for just an HD decoder box). But with my bedroom TV, I had been able to just plug the cable from the wall directly into the TV and get a bunch of digital and HD stations. No such luck with the new TV; the remote control had a "-" button for typing in the digital subchannel (e.g. 84-2 for WGBH-HD, the PBS channel), but it was not working at all. After several calls to Comcast and Samsung, most of which were spent talking to people who clearly knew even less about it than I did, I finally got someone at Samsung who asked an actual technical person and told me that the digital tuner only worked with antenna broadcast, not cable. In other words, it was not Digital Cable Ready and did not have a CableCARD slot, despite the Amazon.com product description which clearly stated the opposite. Apparently this feature was removed from all 2006 Samsung models, so I guess Amazon was going from last year's spec sheet or something.
So I ordered a special HDTV antenna. For $20 I figured there wasn't much risk, and actually it works just fine—I can now get all the broadcast channels in HD, even from the bottom floor of a three-story house in the city, because the digital signals don't need to be nearly as strong as the analog signals. I can even get some channels that I can't get on cable: each of ABC, NBC, and CBS also broadcasts a second subchannel that always shows the weather map, and WGBX (another PBS channel) has four digital subchannels during the day (mostly kids' programming). Only one problem: when I started up the auto-channel-finder, the TV froze for a minute or so, then rebooted. And after the reboot, it froze again—even the power button didn't work, I had to actually unplug it to turn it off. I did this a few times, but it still was completely unresponsive. I was nearly panicked thinking I had just broken the TV, but once I disconnected the antenna, the TV started to work just fine again. Eventually I discovered that it only freezes on the WGBX channels (44-1 through 44-4), but after it reboots it's still tuned to the same channel, and apparently those channels are broadcasting some special signal that triggers a freeze bug in the TV, so it wil just keep rebooting and freezing until the antenna is disconnected so that it's no longer receiving that signal. I called up Samsung again, who called a local repair site for me, and after a few days of phone tag I finally got someone to come out to make a house call. It was somewhat of a surprise when the repair person turned out to be a tall, blonde Russian woman—not exactly Molotov Cocktease, but a far cry from what I was expecting, namely Larry the Cable Guy. Anyway, she replaced the motherboard, but the new one turned out to have the same problem. So now I have to wait for them to release a firmware upgrade that fixes the bug; she promised that they would call me when this happens, but I have a feeling it will have to be up to me to follow up on this. Not that I really care about those particular channels, but it would suck if other channels started broadcasting something that triggered the same bug.
Meanwhile, the other thing I hadn't expected was that I had to get a new TV stand. My old stand was a bit too narrow, which wasn't a huge problem, but it was also too tall: when you sit in the couch, the center of the screen is almost a foot above eye level. So I ordered a stand put out by Samsung designed especially for this TV. It arrived a couple weeks ago but yesterday I finally got around to putting it together. It was very easy to put together, and seems nice and sturdy. It was a bit expensive at $175, and if I ever get a different-sized TV it will be pretty much useless, but still I'm happy with it.
I'm actually happy with the TV, too. There's been a lot of random annoying stuff to deal with, and my opinion of Amazon.com has gone down a few notches, but overall I think it was a good deal and it's a nice thing to have. I haven't actually even watched it all that much yet, and hardly at all with actual HDTV signals. But I'm hoping that when the next-generation Tivo comes out I can get rid of the Comcast DVR, get one for the bedroom and one for the living room, connect them over the network, and be able to watch HDTV on demand in either place. We'll see how that works out...
I ended up deciding on a Samsung HL-S4666W 46" DLP HDTV from Amazon.com. I was wary of buying something that big (and fragile) by mail-order, but the reviews on that page seemed trustworthy and said it would be fine. It was certainly a good deal; Circuit City (which is where I got my other TV) had the same model but smaller (42") for about 15% more, not including tax, while Amazon.com had free shipping and no tax. Altogether it was only about 10% more than the 26" LCD; I guess DLP (Digital Light Processing) is not quite as nice as LCD or plasma, but it's much more cost-effective at that size and seems to be high enough quality that the difference isn't major.
Unfortunately this was not my best experience with Amazon.com. I ordered it on the morning of Thursday, July 6. The page said "usually ships in 24 hours", and that standard shipping was "3-5 days"; I was planning to have it in time for some Lost viewing on Sunday, July 16, so I figured 6 business days would be a reasonable amount of time. The first problem was that it didn't actually ship until late afternoon on Monday, July 10. It was shipped via Eagle USA (EGL), which I guess is a special carrier for large items like this; when I looked up my tracking number, it said the shipping class was "Economy 5 days" and the estimate was Monday, July 17. I worked from home that day, but there was no sign of it. Then on Tuesday afternoon I got voice mail saying that I had to call to make an appointment for it to be delivered, and when I called back the earliest they could give me was the next day (Wednesday), and the delivery window was "between 8am and 5pm". So it finally showed up (with two delivery guys who helpfully removed it from the box and set it up) about noon on Wednesday, July 18, almost two weeks after I ordered it. Not that two weeks is a terribly long time to ship an 85-pound TV, but it was way outside the range I was expecting from what Amazon had on their web page.
When I ordered the TV I also ordered an upconverting DVD player for about $90. Regular DVDs can only hold standard-definition recordings; newer formats that can store high-def are just starting to come out this year, namely HD-DVD and Blu-Ray, but the players are still expensive and the formats are incompatible (just like VHS and Betamax), so it'll be a while before one of them wins out and the price comes down. Meanwhile, there are these special (but inexpensive) players that take regular DVDs but output an HD signal via HDMI, using some heuristics to generate a better picture than you would normally get by just displaying standard-def component input. But for some reason neither the TV nor the DVD player came with an HDMI cable, so I went over to Circuit City to pick one up. Turns out the cheapest one they carry is $99, which was out of stock, and the next least expensive model was $120! Just for a plain old cable! I decided to shop around, and thankfully Target had an HDMI cable from General Electric that was only $40. When I got home and plugged it in it worked just fine. Is this just a scam or what? Why would anyone pay a hundred bucks for some wires and plugs?
The next problem was that I couldn't figure out how to get an HDTV signal from the Comcast cable. I have a Comcast HD DVR in my bedroom, but I'm not ready to pay another $17/mo for a second one (or even $12/mo for just an HD decoder box). But with my bedroom TV, I had been able to just plug the cable from the wall directly into the TV and get a bunch of digital and HD stations. No such luck with the new TV; the remote control had a "-" button for typing in the digital subchannel (e.g. 84-2 for WGBH-HD, the PBS channel), but it was not working at all. After several calls to Comcast and Samsung, most of which were spent talking to people who clearly knew even less about it than I did, I finally got someone at Samsung who asked an actual technical person and told me that the digital tuner only worked with antenna broadcast, not cable. In other words, it was not Digital Cable Ready and did not have a CableCARD slot, despite the Amazon.com product description which clearly stated the opposite. Apparently this feature was removed from all 2006 Samsung models, so I guess Amazon was going from last year's spec sheet or something.
So I ordered a special HDTV antenna. For $20 I figured there wasn't much risk, and actually it works just fine—I can now get all the broadcast channels in HD, even from the bottom floor of a three-story house in the city, because the digital signals don't need to be nearly as strong as the analog signals. I can even get some channels that I can't get on cable: each of ABC, NBC, and CBS also broadcasts a second subchannel that always shows the weather map, and WGBX (another PBS channel) has four digital subchannels during the day (mostly kids' programming). Only one problem: when I started up the auto-channel-finder, the TV froze for a minute or so, then rebooted. And after the reboot, it froze again—even the power button didn't work, I had to actually unplug it to turn it off. I did this a few times, but it still was completely unresponsive. I was nearly panicked thinking I had just broken the TV, but once I disconnected the antenna, the TV started to work just fine again. Eventually I discovered that it only freezes on the WGBX channels (44-1 through 44-4), but after it reboots it's still tuned to the same channel, and apparently those channels are broadcasting some special signal that triggers a freeze bug in the TV, so it wil just keep rebooting and freezing until the antenna is disconnected so that it's no longer receiving that signal. I called up Samsung again, who called a local repair site for me, and after a few days of phone tag I finally got someone to come out to make a house call. It was somewhat of a surprise when the repair person turned out to be a tall, blonde Russian woman—not exactly Molotov Cocktease, but a far cry from what I was expecting, namely Larry the Cable Guy. Anyway, she replaced the motherboard, but the new one turned out to have the same problem. So now I have to wait for them to release a firmware upgrade that fixes the bug; she promised that they would call me when this happens, but I have a feeling it will have to be up to me to follow up on this. Not that I really care about those particular channels, but it would suck if other channels started broadcasting something that triggered the same bug.
Meanwhile, the other thing I hadn't expected was that I had to get a new TV stand. My old stand was a bit too narrow, which wasn't a huge problem, but it was also too tall: when you sit in the couch, the center of the screen is almost a foot above eye level. So I ordered a stand put out by Samsung designed especially for this TV. It arrived a couple weeks ago but yesterday I finally got around to putting it together. It was very easy to put together, and seems nice and sturdy. It was a bit expensive at $175, and if I ever get a different-sized TV it will be pretty much useless, but still I'm happy with it.
I'm actually happy with the TV, too. There's been a lot of random annoying stuff to deal with, and my opinion of Amazon.com has gone down a few notches, but overall I think it was a good deal and it's a nice thing to have. I haven't actually even watched it all that much yet, and hardly at all with actual HDTV signals. But I'm hoping that when the next-generation Tivo comes out I can get rid of the Comcast DVR, get one for the bedroom and one for the living room, connect them over the network, and be able to watch HDTV on demand in either place. We'll see how that works out...
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